Saving Agnes Read online

  ‘Don’t buck the system, Barbara!’ Jean would cry as Agnes was discovered performing emergency surgery on a filing cabinet so full that it appeared to be vomiting sheaves of paper. Barbara was the name of Agnes’s predecessor, whose ghost evidently still walked for Jean.

  ‘I was only trying to help!’ Agnes would rejoin; but Jean, who wore the look of one doing things for the war effort, had long since formed the opinion that there was a saboteur in their midst and was not to be fooled by any such protestations of innocence.

  Conspiratorial solace soon appeared in the form of Jean’s personal assistant, Greta, who returned from holiday just as Agnes was beginning to wonder if she would ever return to waking life. Greta was certainly personal, to the point of rudeness, with her employer, but Agnes was cheered to see that there was someone who was of even less assistance than herself. On first encountering her, Agnes had been somewhat alarmed by Greta’s transatlantic accent and air-hostess smile, but she soon learned that Greta had a curious allure, an ability to arouse unlikely behaviour in those around her, which lent her a strange and devilish beauty.

  ‘This city is bizarre,’ she sighed when arriving in the office one morning. ‘I was crossing the road over there when some guy in a truck drinking a can of beer stopped at the lights and just spat a whole mouthful all over me.’

  The beer stain adorning the front of her jacket bore witness to her story and she waited, doe-eyed and credulous, for an explanation, while Agnes and Jean assured her that such occurrences were far from commonplace; which admission seemed only to baffle her further.

  ‘The guy in the truck?’ she said finally. ‘He kind of reminded me of my boyfriend back home.’

  Greta was a Ukrainian Canadian, and if a marriage between these two cultures seemed unlikely, their brief encounter in the form of Greta was unregrettable. She had come to London six months earlier, and despite finding the city to be drab, tedious and inhospitable in the extreme, saw no reason why she should leave. In addition to her unconventional style of dress – she favoured garish colours and dressed as if in preparation for a carnival or costume ball: clownish stripes combined with military epaulets, Elizabethan ruffs with rakish ponchos – Greta’s voluptuous beauty and unsuspecting nature invited much attention, most of it, as far as Agnes could see, unwelcome.

  ‘I’m on a diet,’ she announced one lunchtime.

  ‘Why?’ queried Agnes, amazed that she should contemplate such an activity when her life already seemed to be in constant peril.

  ‘Oh, some guy came up to me in the street last night and said I was a fat cow,’ said Greta cheerfully. ‘He suggested I might try and lose some weight.’

  As if it were infectious, Agnes too began to discover the discomfort of strangers, but the weightiness for her of such encounters could not be so easily lost. She began to attract the attentions of the mad, the vagrant and those down on their luck in a manner she hoped was no relation to recognition. Once a soft touch for these ragged moralists who inveigled her into sparing them her change, Agnes began to cross the road, begging for some change in her circumstances. She witnessed her expulsion from the civilised world daily as she completed the arduous journey to the misleadingly named Finchley Central, where the offices of Diplomat’s Week clung to the city’s edge like a penitent cliff-top suicide, hoping against hope that someone, anyone remotely sane, would stay on the train beyond Highgate; but by the time they reached Camden Town the majority of those whom she could not picture stealing her wallet had long since disembarked, and as the train blasted through the topsoil into the charmless overground world of East Finchley the last feverish, pulsating remnants of the mad morning rush were gone.

  Until that moment Agnes usually managed to sustain the appearance of a thrusting young professional running on a tight schedule; but then someone switched on the lights, pulled off the mask, revealed the pretender for exactly who she was. Women fanned themselves and fainted in the aisles in dismay; men in tight tailcoats stood up, red-faced, and waved their programmes demanding redress. For she was none other than Agnes Day: sub-editor, suburbanite, failure extraordinaire.

  Chapter Three

  AGNES Day was her real name, but this seemed to surprise no one other than herself. For her own part, she could not conjure up a single plausible reason why anyone should want to inflict a name such as that upon an innocent person. Agnes had, in fact, been the name of her father’s mother; and while most of the time she chose to overlook the rather pedestrian logic this coincidence implied, in moments of fear at the world’s cruelty she was forced to concede that to have inherited little from this lady other than her appellatory misfortune constituted something of a lucky escape.

  As a child Agnes had been imaginative – a word often used to explain the character of a compulsive liar – and had enjoyed frequent changes of identity which, as far as she could see, it would have cost the small group of people who counted as her world in those days little to honour. A few times, in truth, they had attempted to humour her delightful precocities, their faces taut at first with suppressed smiles and later with irritation, but the rapid turnover of transmogrification often left them standing.

  ‘Bathsheba, could you pass the salt?’ her father would politely inquire.

  ‘Boadicea!’ Agnes would cry; which exhortation would usually rend from her less indulgent mother a plea along the lines of ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Agnes!’ Agnes would then be forced again to correct the form of her address, and would inevitably be rewarded with a stinging backside and the liberty to retire to her room as soon as she liked.

  As Agnes approached puberty her identity crisis, escaping the contemptuous adolescent pruning of all things childish, grew, along with the other nascent buds of her evolving world-view, from a whimsical fantasy into an issue of earth-shattering importance. A rejection of all things outlandish in favour of the ephemeral trappings of peer conformity was only natural, and although she soon lost her taste for elaborate nomenclature, her desperate need for acceptability outpaced it. Seeing the Dominiques, Gemmas and Antoinettes at school become more beautiful, clever and confident than the rest, and seeing also that she had not accompanied them in this transformation, merely confirmed what she already knew to be true – that what would have been success by any other name was fast becoming failure by her own.

  The adult world being impervious to the tender-hearted miseries of youth, and assuming that identity was a more or less fixed matter whose flaws were the responsibility of no one other than their owner, Agnes knew that hers would be a solitary struggle. Wishing to spare those who did not really deserve any more careful consideration than they had shown in naming her, and secretly fearful of straying too far from the terms on which her worldly existence so far had seemed to depend, she chose her own middle name, Grace. Even her elders in all their irrational mystery could not object to such a choice, as they themselves had selected the name from all the thousands which had haunted her mother’s bulging belly like wispy little-girl ghosts, as runner-up.

  Why Grace, superior as she so evidently was, had not won this early contest Agnes could not imagine; but her battle for reinstatement second time around looked set for victory. To Agnes’s dumbfoundment her parents did not object to her plan, and even humoured her so far as to suggest measures for its smoother implementation. Her mother advised that she try the name at home first to see if she liked it, and Agnes, always glad of an opportunity $$o disguise apprehension with obedience, made a fine show of reluctant agreement.

  For a while, then, Grace was an honoured guest in their house, a favoured foster-child who emanated sunshine and laughter wherever she went. Her pronouncements were solemnly heard, her opinions sought out, her health and happiness the priority of the household. Only her brother, the more prosaically named Tom, continued to refer to Agnes in a manner not entirely respectful to the dead.

  ‘Let’s say Agnes,’ he would declare as the family were bowed for grace before supper; or, if Grace declined to join him in
a game of cards, ‘Don’t put on those airs and Agneses with me’ would be his scornful riposte. Tom missed Agnes and had little time for her double, but would certainly not have shared this information with either of them.

  Inevitably, as the days wore on, it fell to Grace’s lot to do the share of household chores which had been Agnes’s, and which had been temporarily forestalled while her arrival was still a novelty. There was also a portion of ill-humour and reprimand to be claimed, and it surprised Grace to discover that it was indistinguishable from that which had befallen Agnes. Gradually Grace began to feel disenchanted with her new home, especially when she contemplated in the mirror the toll it was taking on her looks. She was not the ravishing creature of fantasy she once had been, and nor did she inspire the love and admiration she once had known. She began, in short, to consider taking her leave; and although the change was so gradual as almost to elude their notice, the family one day realised that Agnes was with them once more.

  Their joy at this discovery did not console their prodigal daughter. Agnes was convinced that Grace had been driven away by her family’s ill-treatment – not to mention their incurable tendency to call her Agnes – and under such circumstances she could ill afford any pleasure at their very evident relief to have her back with them. Tom’s cunning wordplay, however, remained, and enjoyed frequent airings in a context which Agnes could only later begin to see, with a controllable quantity of grief, as family humour.

  It would have surprised them, no doubt, to learn that some part of Agnes had been irretrievably lost through this episode; and though it would never have occurred to her to blame them, she sometimes wondered why the proliferation of selves she would have liked to be and lives she would have liked to live remained locked inside her, prisoners of utmost secrecy and shame. And while it taught her that reality meant failure, ugliness and self-contempt, it also instilled in her the belief that the good in her was but fiction. As she grew older and encountered the approbation of friends and lovers, this fiction became ever more elaborate, until she feared that one day she would crumble beneath the weight of her deception and lose all that she most valued. Once Agnes had mourned Grace, but eventually she came to loathe and fear her; for she had taken everything that she once loved in herself, every particle of hope and optimism and beauty, and made it false. Agnes did not create Grace: it was Grace who created Agnes, slapped her together with the dross and scraps she did not want herself. Agnes saw her sometimes, the model on the cover of a magazine, the byline on a witty news feature, the laughing glamorous figure in a red sports car driven by an adoring boyfriend. I wish it were me! she would think. It should have been me.

  Chapter Four

  AGNES Day painted her face and starved herself; she shaved her legs and plucked her eyebrows and scrubbed the gravelly flesh on her thighs with a mitt of similar texture. She moisturised here and desiccated there, purged her skin of odour and oil and then force-fed it with creams and sprays, as if hoping that one day it would give off of its own accord the exotic fragrance and softness which were now but briefly borrowed. Occasionally, she would bleach the rather unsightly shadow of dark hairs that fell across her upper lip, a process which, albeit temporarily, necessitated that she sport an ebullient white cream moustache over the meagre but offending dark one. Sometimes it seemed to her as if her body were in a constant state of revolt, maliciously engendering odour and ugliness, coarse hair sprouting through every pore, flesh puckering here and sagging there. She was vigilant and artful in stemming protuberance and decay, but subversion was all around. Only recently she had discovered a horrifyingly virulent crop of dark hairs on the backs of her marbled – or, as Romantic poets would perhaps rather, marble – thighs. The fact that this discovery had come only days after she read of a similar complaint in a women’s magazine was, she thought, a sublime if unsettling coincidence. The magazine had suggested waxing or electrolysis as the most efficacious remedy, but to Agnes these things were redolent of mystery and pain, and were more easily applied, in her mind, to the writing of great poetry than to the backs of the legs.

  Contrary to appearances, Agnes would have liked nothing better than to be natural, for she regarded this incessant pruning and weeding as burdensome. She did not see it as her womanly business to pluck and purge and preen; rather, it was with the aim of securing for herself what nature omitted generously to bestow that she occupied herself thus. She regarded Nina’s bare face and downy legs with more envy than contempt and, with a degree of humility which would have surprised no one more than herself had she been aware of it, strove not to please others but merely not to disgust them.

  So it was that Agnes, knowing herself to be a fake, and being fatally attracted to the unforgiving expert sex, spent her days in mortal fear of discovery. Guiltily she hid the tools of her loathsome trade; filled with self-hatred, she left her bed, on those sparse but nonetheless harrowing occasions when there was someone sharing it, to scrub from her the unnatural stench of the night’s activities. She would meet her own eyes in the mirror and would see them fill with tears as they contemplated the red and blotchy character of their surrounds. Before she numbly set about superimposing with artifice the glowing and satisfied visage the evening had somehow failed to supply, she sometimes felt the hatred almost reaching down and dissolving her fear. Something wild and indecipherable had taken hold: for had she been discovered then, bare and trembling in the cold bathroom, all the acrimony in the world would have been but confirmation. She derived a strange comfort from knowing she was as naked as the truth.

  Few, then, would have perceived that Agnes Day felt less vanity than guilt as she readied herself for an assignation in central Islington. Her destination was the stranger encountered by the bathroom door, and the brief memory she had of his quiet and critical bearing informed her that her preparations would require exceptional assiduity if he was also to become her destiny. She met the glance of her bare face like that of a stranger and eyed her naked body with the indifference of a bored husband blunted by years of custom. Robed and daubed, however, she recognised herself once more, and scrutinised her reflection front, side and back as if in preparation for attack. She wore her hair long, a trick intended to clear up any queries as to her gender. As a child she had often been mistaken for a boy, and although now she felt she possessed sufficient evidence to refute any such claims, the memory of those who once doubted lingered uncomfortably at the back of her mind.

  As it was still light Agnes walked the distance, crossing Highbury Fields just as the sun raked over the soft pastel sky and disappeared, leaving it scarred with violet welts. Boys kicked balls and wheeled aimlessly on bikes, their cries fluttering up through the trees like fugitive birds, their shadows long and skinny as poles.

  ‘All right, darlin’?’ someone shouted to her.

  A row of teenagers sat on a bench like crows on a telegraph wire, blowing artless clouds of smoke from summer cigarettes through their gappy, grinning mouths. Agnes passed behind a tree and used her temporary occlusion to tug at her skirt, wishing it were not so short. She felt suddenly vulgar with her cardboard face and gashed bleeding mouth, shown up by the delicate evening, the whisper of twilight, the soft texture of leaf and sky. Her perfume clawed at the translucent scent of flowers and grass until she felt almost nauseous.

  She passed through the park and regained the thundering roadside. A lorry roared by her with a hot rush of diesel. The sudden commotion was deafening. She stood on the concrete pavement in terror. People looked at her as they shoved past, some with annoyance, others, the men, with a kind of sneering admiration. She thought of him waiting for her, and for a moment the whole predictable chute of their putative future opened out there on the roadside: a saga of love and loss, a lightning cruise around places she had seen before. At that moment she would have stayed there, paralysed, until dogs cocked their legs against her; but the oddity of her predicament soon forced itself upon her, and she began to walk. Perhaps, after all, he could save her. Perha
ps he would.

  He was late, but Agnes had learned not to mind that; indeed, she expected nothing less. She sat at a table out of sight of the door but perfectly angled by a window which afforded a view of the street, so that she would receive information of his arrival early enough to be able to greet it with studied indifference. Outside night had fallen, and she found her gaze wandering into the darkened street, where a decrepit neon sign over the launderette opposite read WE CLEAN CURTAINS AND LOVERS. She got on well enough with anticipation. In her view, the experience of things before they happened generally provided the most pleasing version of events. It occurred to her that believing in anticipation was not unlike believing in God, another of her covert vices. It was the same drift of soul and mind towards perfection, and to Agnes the thought of perceiving the world without this dimension was to see only shadows and not the things which cast them.

  There had been times, of course, when she had gambled all and lost, when she had thought her heart would surely break with disappointment that reality had not exceeded – or even matched – her imaginings. Nina, whose belief in the concrete was almost architectural, had often advised her to expect less; the reasoning being that what she did receive would thus seem like more. Agnes considered that now, as her malicious watch told her he was fifteen minutes late. She tried to imagine him coming in, flopping down uncouthly opposite her, drinking tepid vats of stinking beer until she thought his gut would explode; then belching, perhaps, a hand on her knee.

  So successful were the effects of this unpleasant hallucination that she began to feel rather sick. She closed her eyes and it was then that she suddenly felt the elusive breath of him beside her, the warm, clean smell of him, the soft expensive touch of his coat against her arm. He bent over and planted a smooth kiss on her forehead, tender as a blessing. The practised air with which this gesture was accomplished did not entirely pass her by. She was glad he knew what to do. She had been foolish to underestimate him. He was, as she had seen when first they met, a professional. That, she hoped, was something they had in common, for a start.